Younger Conservatives are inclined to believe that leaving the EU is the right
way forward – there’s a battle to come, and it will be fought to the death

John Campbell’s superb new biography of Roy Jenkins is an account of a political generation shaped by war, less sullied by spin, and more erudite than those that have followed. But – reading of Jenkins’s long and remarkable career – one is also struck by the symmetries between his era and our own.

The Blair-Brown feud disfigured Labour politics for more than a decade, leaving a sulphurous memory that still lingers. Yet it was nothing new: the apex of the Labour movement in the second half of the 20th century – Jenkins, Tony Crosland, Denis Healey – was riven with such entangled friendships and passionate rivalries.

Sometimes the continuities are exact. On June 2 1975, David Dimbleby chaired a special BBC debate between Jenkins and Tony Benn, both members of the Labour Cabinet, divided by their respective convictions on Britain’s membership of what was then the Common Market. In the referendum four days later, the electorate overwhelmingly endorsed Jenkins’s belief that Britain was better off “In”.

Thirty-nine years on, it is, once again, Dimbleby who will present the BBC’s debate this Wednesday between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage. And, once again, the issue at stake is Britain’s future relationship with Europe.

The first round of Clegg-Farage, hosted by LBC, was fought last week. In the 1975 duel between Jenkins and Benn, as Campbell records, “it was an open question who came off best”. So it seemed to me last week: my real-time response on Twitter was that Clegg had won “by a nose”. A snap YouGov poll for The Sun, on the other hand, indicated a clear victory for the Ukip leader, who scored 57 per cent to the Deputy Prime Minister’s 36. The Clegg team complains that the YouGov survey was not appropriately “weighted”, skewed towards the views of older people and certain regions. They will also adjust their tactics for Round Two: some around Clegg believe he needs to take the fight to Farage more aggressively and plainly, and to accuse the Ukip leader of living on an economic “fantasy island”.

Yet – irrespective of the post-debate polls – the deeper Lib Dem objective has already been met, which was to present Clegg as a conviction politician unafraid of stepping into the ring, and to secure unmediated access to the public. He has a little over 13 months to avoid disaster in the general election. So little things mean a lot.

Farage, too, has already achieved his core mission. In the 1975 debate, Dimbleby’s guests were both household-name Cabinet ministers. Today Clegg passes that test. But the Ukip leader is a mere MEP, the spokesman of a single-issue party not represented in the Commons that has yet to escape its identity as nothing more than the political wing of a reactionary, Right-wing breakaway movement. These debates will help Ukip escape that categorisation, and to accrue greater legitimacy.

No less important – perhaps more so – were the noises off in the spin room, on Twitter and in the broadcast panels that followed. Andrew Mitchell, invited by LBC’s Iain Dale to comment on the debate, was to be heard arguing that the only way for the electorate to secure a referendum was to vote Conservative in the general election. Mitchell himself remains a serious candidate to become Britain’s next commissioner to Brussels. There is, I gather, a shortlist of two: the former development secretary and chief whip, and Andrew Lansley, presently Leader of the House.

As Mitchell offered his analysis and Tory politicians and pundits tweeted volubly, John Redwood prowled the spin room, leaving little doubt where his sympathies lay. On his blog, he recorded that “Mr Clegg bombed badly in the debate last night”.

Peter Bone, the fiercely Eurosceptic Tory MP for Wellingborough, was also on hand, complaining that Cameron should have been there, making the Tory case. In moments of exasperation, the PM has been heard to say that he would rather form another Coalition after the next election than win a small majority and, in practice, govern in a daily modified coalition with Bone and his gang of hardcore Eurosceptic backbenchers (“Bonie’s Cronies”, as I have heard them described).

In any case, if Cameron wins with a majority of any sort, or negotiates a second coalition that includes the fulfilment of his pledge to hold a referendum before the end of 2017, the Conservative Party’s energies will be utterly absorbed by Europe, as never before, for up to 18 months. It is a foretaste of this which last week’s debate truly provided. Clegg and Farage made all the principal points for leaving and staying – most of them familiar. But they were surrounded by coiled springs wearing blue rosettes, awaiting their turn.

“This is what it would be like,” said one minister close to Cameron last week. “A year and a half when we need to be doing big second-term stuff, and the whole government paralysed by this do-or-die row over Europe.” The minister is right. How could it be otherwise? Having promised the referendum himself, and having positively invited rhetorical conflict, Cameron could scarcely complain under such circumstances that his party was “banging on about Europe”.

Farage’s pitch is saloon-bar straight talk, with the strengths and weaknesses of that genre. But if there really is a referendum, Ukip will not be Cameron’s biggest problem. Nothing like, in fact. Assuming that the PM urges the electorate to stay in the EU, on the basis of his renegotiation of our membership, his most dangerous foes will be those within his own party who draw different conclusions.

Michael Gove has already said that – as things stand today – he would vote to leave the EU. Boris Johnson has refused to commit himself unambiguously, but hinted that his answer might be the same as Gove’s. Their minds, and the minds of others like them, might be changed by Cameron’s diplomacy. But some of the PM’s colleagues will resist his argument.

Worst of all for Cameron, younger Tory MPs are becoming more inclined to believe that “Brexit” is the right way forward. Typical of this trend is Douglas Carswell (Clacton), who argues on the basis of contemporary geopolitical reality, rather than reactionary spleen, that Britain would be better off as an independent Western Singapore than an offshore branch of the creaking, antiquated Eurocracy.

The Clegg-Farage debates are a premonition of a much greater battle to come, and one which, if Cameron is still prime minister after the next election, will certainly be fought to the death. It has been his fate to confront and resolve issues he did not expect to face. One such was same-sex marriage, which, thanks to the PM’s determination, became legal in England and Wales this weekend.

This is another. Cameron began his leadership imploring the Tories to stop “banging on” about Europe. If he wins next year, they will do little else. But such, as this Prime Minister has come to realise, is the Bismarckian fate of any head of government: to hear the march of history, and try as best as he can to catch on to its coat-tails.